


One Face, and You Make Yourselves Another

by imagined_melody



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Shapeshifting, mentions of canon-typical scarring and bodily harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-19
Updated: 2019-08-19
Packaged: 2020-09-08 04:03:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20304508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imagined_melody/pseuds/imagined_melody
Summary: Neil had been eight years old (and still Nathaniel) when he had discovered that he could modify his appearance at will.Written for the 2019 AFTG Summer Exchange!





	One Face, and You Make Yourselves Another

**Author's Note:**

> I had to ask for a brief extension on the deadline for this year's Summer Exchange, but here it is! Neilfoxten asked for a Magic!AU, and after a lot of thought, this is what my brain came up with. :D This fic was actually something of a (rather fun) challenge for me! It was a premise that could easily have been extended a lot longer, but in the interest of time, I wrote it in a very condensed format. Hopefully it still ticks all the right boxes for you.
> 
> (Technically this is gen, but there are indirect hints of potential Andreil and Kevineil in here. Again, time made it impossible to explore any of those dynamics further, so it's left somewhat up to the imagination of the reader.)

The first time Kevin saw Neil wearing his real face, all he could say was: “I should have known. I _always_ know.”

Neil had been eight years old (and still Nathaniel) when he had discovered that he could modify his appearance at will. It had been an accident, at first. He’d woken up one morning and when he looked in the mirror, he had the sensation he could feel something in the air, the _potential_ for something. He closed his eyes, let his mind go blank—and when he opened them again, he had _changed._ Not much; his hair was slightly darker, his eyes more green than blue. He’d been frightened, at first: he’d shut his eyes tight again, wished himself back to normal, and when he’d opened them again he looked as he always had. Little by little, he realized he could do it on purpose, and before long he’d gotten it down to an art form.

There were some limitations to it, of course. After extensive attempts to give himself wings or fur, he determined that he was only capable of generating human body parts; also, he could not quite replicate the features of any actual human being he knew. (He’d tried—spent hours trying to turn himself into the other boys on his Little League team—but though he could mimic their general characteristics, he couldn’t quite clone them.) He also only seemed to be able to imitate the age at which he currently was; trying to make himself into an adult produced no success. 

Magical gifts like his were fairly rare, he learned when he showed it to his mother. She frowned at him and forbade him to tell his father that he could do this, but that warning was unnecessary. Nathaniel’s goal, where his father was concerned, was to appear as unremarkable as possible in every way other than his talent for Exy. Nathan Wesninski was drawn to exceptional people, but more often than not their gifts were put to terrible purposes. If his father knew what he could do, Nathaniel was sure there would be some way it would cost him. So he showed it to as few people as possible, and kept it a secret until the moment his mother woke him in the middle of the night and told him to get dressed as quietly as he could, led him to the tunnels beneath their house, and ran from the Butcher of Baltimore without looking back.

That night, she held him to her body and whispered in his ear. “You have to use your powers,” she said quietly, fervently. “You have to disguise yourself, Nathaniel. Make yourself look like a new person. It’s the only way you can ever be free.”

So every time they changed cities, Nathaniel’s mother assigned them a new identity, and Nathaniel changed his appearance to match. They moved, and he became Alex; again, and he was Stefan; in another town, he became Chris. Twenty-two times, he looked in the mirror and reached out for whatever magic power inside himself controlled his outward appearance. 

The day he looked into the mirror in a California motel and morphed into the face that he would later name Neil Josten, he had no idea it would be the last false identity he would ever create.

-

“I should have known,” Kevin said more than a year later. “I _always_ know.”

He had displayed this skill as a sort of game with Kevin, when they had played Exy together as children. Showing off a secret magical power to anyone was recklessly dangerous, but he’d been young and too-eager to impress the rising star of this bastard sport. So any of the rare times he, Kevin, and Riko were out in public, he’d shift his looks to blend in, forcing Kevin to try and identify which of several unfamiliar faces was really his. And Kevin, sharp-eyed and cautious as always, had guessed correctly almost every time.

Now Kevin was looking at him like his real face was tantamount to a betrayal—or maybe like his old face, his Neil face, was the one that had somehow hurt him. Neil felt suddenly, painfully naked without it. 

“You weren’t supposed to know,” he replied. _I couldn’t stay here if you knew,_ his mind added. _The disguise had to be so good even you wouldn’t see through it._

Kevin frowned at him. “I guess I hoped—” He trailed off, cleared his throat, and tried again. “I hoped if something happened to you, you would want me to find you.” He stared at Neil hard. “This isn’t a game, is it? Not like it was back then.”

“No,” Neil said, shaking his head. “It’s not a game anymore.”

Riko had made it clear, at the Nest over winter break, that Neil was forbidden to hide his real face now that his true identity was known. For the first time in years, he had to step out into the world as he really was. It was frightening, but he had Kevin watching his back and Andrew protecting them both, and the option still left to run and shift into someone new again if it all went terribly wrong.

-

And then Lola came along, and everything was ruined.

There was a funny thing about shapeshifting: individual features could be changed, eye and skin and hair color, freckles, and so on. But some things, it turned out, were permanent. A shapeshifter couldn’t close a piercing, or regrow a missing limb.

Or make a scar disappear.

Lola’s torture was agonizing, but its real purpose wasn’t to cause him pain. No, the suffering she intended was worse than that. She put scars on him where no clothing would cover them, where even makeup would still reveal them. She knew that no matter how else he changed his appearance, he wouldn’t be able to shift them away. In short, she made it impossible for him to hide.

There was no running, not anymore. His scars would show through any new face he wore. 

It was almost more traumatizing than the recovery period from his injuries. Every time he looked in the mirror, he saw the perfect image of his father looking back; if he tried to morph into someone else, someone less frightening, the scars remained dark and livid no matter what. 

Andrew had found him in the bathroom a few days after they returned: staring at himself in the mirror, his fingers trembling with how viscerally he hated the face looking back at him. He hadn’t realized he’d been holding his breath until Andrew guided his face away from the reflection, and he let it out in a rush. “_Fuck,_” he whispered, feeling the world shift back from that precipice. Distantly, he realized he might have been about to smash that mirror if Andrew hadn’t snapped him out of his spiral.

Andrew raised an eyebrow. “Problem?” he asked, but while his phrasing was flippant, there was something mild about the way he said it. 

“I hate this face,” Neil growled. “I hate that I can’t change it. Not really. That power was—it was all I had, and now it’s _worthless._”

Andrew dropped his hand back to his side. “It doesn’t matter. You don’t need it anymore.”

“I’m a shapeshifter, Andrew.”

“You’re Neil Josten,” Andrew corrected. “Nothing else. Not now. That face wasn’t _you._ Leave it in Baltimore and be who you really are.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Neil said. It was the truest thing he could think of to say.

Andrew shrugged. “Well,” he replied, “I guess you’ll have to find out.”

-

The sun was warm on the beach—the last place he thought he would ever want to be, after what happened the last time he was there, but it felt different now that the rest of the Foxes were around. They’d come to the shore for a summer road trip, and he’d been fine for the car ride down, where he could annoy Kevin and listen to Andrew’s music and stare out at the road as they hurtled down it. Behind him now, the upperclassmen were shouting and kicking sand at each other; he could hear the plasticky _thunk_ of a beach ball hitting skin as someone tried to start a particularly aggressive game of dodgeball. But Neil stood apart from the rest of them, looking down at his reflection in the water. 

He knew when Kevin came to stand next to him less from his physical presence in his peripheral vision, but from the sharp intake of breath he gave when he glanced over at Neil’s profile.

“You look like—” he said, and stopped, his face tight again.

Neil knew what he looked like. Ever since he peeled off from the group and came out to stand by the water, his hair had darkened back to its former black hue, and his eyes had gone muddy brown. He’d turned back into the person he was when he first came to the Foxes.

It no longer felt like him anymore, but it seemed right to wear it now.

“You can’t go back to being him,” Kevin said quietly. Like everything Kevin said, it came out blunter and harsher than perhaps he meant it.

Neil sighed. “I just needed to wear it one last time,” he said. “Just to say goodbye.”

“Goodbye is for suckers.” The voice came from next to him on his other side. Both Neil and Kevin’s heads turned simultaneously to see that Andrew had snuck up beside them from out of nowhere. The smaller man fixed his intense, unblinking gaze on Neil; he took Neil’s chin in his hand and turned his face toward him. “You promised me you would leave this face behind in Baltimore, Abram. No more aliases.”

In the clear water of the Atlantic Ocean, he could see the scars standing out starkly on his cheeks. They’re a reminder that he can never outrun his true self, no matter how fast he moves or how many different faces he puts on. “No more,” he whispered to himself, more breath than sound.

He closed his eyes tight, felt the air almost crackle around him. On his left, Kevin takes his hand; on his right, Andrew’s shoulder presses close against his own, a comforting, protective weight.

When he opened his eyes and looked at himself again, his eyes were ocean-blue and his hair auburn-red. He curled his lip up in an almost-smile.

The sun is warm on his skin, and the sand is rough on his toes, and he never has to be anyone he’s not ever again.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from a quote from Shakespeare's _Hamlet_: "God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another."
> 
> Find me on tumblr [here](http://imaginedmelody.tumblr.com)!


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